Social Networking
Suster: What the past can tell us about the future of social networking; http://eicker.at/SocialNetworking
Tagged: Friendster Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: a Walled Garden
MacManus: Is it fair for Tim (Berners-Lee) to accuse Facebook of being a walled garden? Yes it is; http://eicker.at/WalledGarden
Gerrit Eicker
Web Defence
Berners-Lee: The Web is critical to the digital revolution, prosperity, liberty. It needs defending; http://eicker.at/TheWeb
-
Gerrit Eicker
Berners-Lee: “The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles. – The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. … Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. … The primary design principle underlying the Web’s usefulness and growth is universality. … Decentralization is another important design feature. … Decentralization has made widespread innovation possible and will continue to do so in the future. … Social-networking sites present a different kind of problem. … Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. … Open Standards Drive Innovation – Allowing any site to link to any other site is necessary but not sufficient for a robust Web. The basic Web technologies that individuals and companies need to develop powerful services must be available for free, with no royalties. … Keeping the web universal and keeping its standards open help people invent new services. But a third principle – the separation of layers – partitions the design of the Web from that of the Internet. … Electronic Human Rights … A neutral communications medium is the basis of a fair, competitive market economy, of democracy, and of science. Debate has risen again in the past year about whether government legislation is needed to protect net neutrality. It is. Although the Internet and Web generally thrive on lack of regulation, some basic values have to be legally preserved. … Free speech should be protected, too. … As long as the web’s basic principles are upheld, its ongoing evolution is not in the hands of any one person or organization – neither mine nor anyone else’s. If we can preserve the principles, the Web promises some fantastic future capabilities. … For example, the latest version of HTML, called HTML5, is not just a markup language but a computing platform that will make Web apps even more powerful than they are now. … A great example of future promise, which leverages the strengths of all the principles, is linked data. … Linked data raise certain issues that we will have to confront. For example, new data-integration capabilities could pose privacy challenges that are hardly addressed by today’s privacy laws. … Now is an exciting time. Web developers, companies, governments and citizens should work together openly and cooperatively, as we have done thus far, to preserve the Web’s fundamental principles, as well as those of the Internet, ensuring that the technological protocols and social conventions we set up respect basic human values. The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.”
Ingram, GigaOM: “Not everyone agrees, however, that Google or Facebook are actually monopolies in any kind of legal sense, although they are definitely dominant players. And while Google is clearly a web giant, Yahoo and AOL were once web giants too, and they are shadows of their former selves now, displaced by completely new players. Even Facebook, which is now seen as one of the companies to be afraid of, is threatened in many ways by Twitter – a startup that barely even existed a few years ago and is now reportedly valued at close to $3 billion. … That said, it’s worth being reminded that large players often see it as being in their interests to restrict the freedom of their users, and that – as Berners-Lee warns in his Scientific American piece – this can chip away at the web’s core principles, which he says revolve around ‘a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere.’ … More critical to free speech than any other medium? That’s a strong claim – but there’s certainly an argument to be made that the web fits that definition.“
Gerrit Eicker
Information Monopolies
WSJ: Do away with Google? Break up Facebook? We can not imagine life without them, and that is the problem; http://eicker.at/1e
Gerrit Eicker 08:53 on 6. December 2010 Permalink |
Suster: “November 2010 and Facebook has 500 million users. They have more page views than even Google. More than 10% of all time on the web is now Facebook. They have become a juggernaut in online advertising, pictures, video and online games. And now they want to revolutionize email. It is no doubt that the next decade belongs to Facebook. But the coincidence is that 10 years out will be 2020 and it’s when we look back from that date I’m certain that people will find a Facebook monopoly a bit laughable. … Is the game over? Have Facebook & Twitter won or is their another act? No prizes for guessing … there’s ALWAYS a second act in technology.”
1. The Social Graph Will Become Portable
2. We Will Form Around ‘True’ Social Networks
3. Privacy Issues Will Continue to Cause Problems
4. Social Networking Will Become Pervasive
5. Third-Party Tools Will Embed Social Features in Websites
6. Social Networking (like the web) Will Split Into Layers
7. Social Chaos Will Create New Business Opportunities
8. Data Will Reign Supreme
9. Facebook Will Not be the Only Dominant Player